The aging population

ultrawomble

blueboy43 wrote: »

A man who was 65 in 2000 would have been born in 1935.

The cohort of males born in that year would have had a life expectancy of approx 62 (estimate) at birth.

A man born in 2000 will have a life expectancy of 75.6 years (from table) again at birth.

By the time the male born in 1935 is 65 (ie year 2000) he is now in a subset of the 1935 birth cohort, that is all those who have survived. That he has another 15.7 years expected to live, does not mean someone born in 1935 has a longer life expectancy than someone born in 2000.

So in other words you're agreeing with what I said here - you're looking at a selected group. A pretty small group in former years.

ultrawomble

Loughton_Monkey wrote: »

This is perfectly logical. Every person's life expectancy continues to rise with age. This is for the simple reason that having lived another year, you have avoided the small chance of dying last year with a resulting increase in life expectancy.

It gets particularly marked in older age. A male aged 60 has a life expectancy of in the order of 21 years. That's 81. Half his peers, therefore, will have died before then. The other half survive. So if he has survived, he now has a life expectancy of another 7 years. Even at age 100, a male still has a life expectancy of about 2 years.

Actuaries are clever individuals. Out of a large number of people, they can predict within a decimal point how many will die next year. The trouble is, they cannot name which ones.

Which begs the question: Why did the state pension age of women lower to 60 in 1948 when a then 65 year old woman would be expected to live a further 15.3 years?

Also, for your man at 60 with a further 21 years life expectancy. He loses 50% of his peers in that time, so what does the attrition curve look like for that grouping? In other words while there'll be an average age of death, what's the median age of death?

RenovationMan

ultrawomble wrote: »

Which begs the question: Why did the state pension age of women lower to 60 in 1948 when a then 65 year old woman would be expected to live a further 15.3 years?

Isn't this because most women did not qualify for a full state pension due to time off work with childcare and the reduction was to redress the balance?

Just supposition, I have no real idea.

ceridwen

ninky wrote: »

i can honestly say i'd love to live forever. yes bring it on. i hate the thought of a future i can never know or experience.

Takes hat off in admiration at such bravery....

Call me a wimp - I wouldnt want any "extra time" at all thanks:)

Generali

prosaver wrote: »

Unemployment is an unbalance between the supply and the demand of working hours. We all know that the efficiency of all types of machines is increasing yearly. We need fewer people to produce the same goods. Work time has been reduced in the past 200 years from about 12 hours a day to less then 8 hours per day and the working week from 7 days to 5. The way to stop Unemployment and have everybody working, is to continue the historical trend; is to distribute the available work between all persons that want to work. This we can do if each person works fewer hours per week.
tell your mp to get his finger out.

It's not quite that simple though. There is also likely to be an imbalance between skiils wanted and those available.

There's little point in me standing aside for a day each week at work to allow an underemplyed accountant, lawyer or waitress to do my job. They couldn't do it.

MRSTITTLEMOUSE

ceridwen wrote: »

Takes hat off in admiration at such bravery....

Call me a wimp - I wouldnt want any "extra time" at all thanks:)

Me neither ceridwen,if you'd asked me 20 years ago I would of said I want to live forever but now I've come to accept that past the usual 85 -90 years my family tend to live to I am quite happy to go.
I happily accept I only have another 30-35 years at the most and embrace life and relationships to the full knowing that.

Butterfly_Brain

prosaver wrote: »

Unemployment is an unbalance between the supply and the demand of working hours. We all know that the efficiency of all types of machines is increasing yearly. We need fewer people to produce the same goods. Work time has been reduced in the past 200 years from about 12 hours a day to less then 8 hours per day and the working week from 7 days to 5. The way to stop Unemployment and have everybody working, is to continue the historical trend; is to distribute the available work between all persons that want to work. This we can do if each person works fewer hours per week.
tell your mp to get his finger out.

Trouble is thousands of manufacturing jobs have been moved to foreign countries. We have become a country were the biggest employers are in the service industries and as such are low paid.

Butterfly_Brain

Everyone gets old!

I hope the ageists remember this when they are in need in their dotage

margaretclare

Torry_Quine wrote: »

I have a relative who left school at 14 and is not yet 78. It looks like it wasn't strictly adhered to.

DH and I are both 75 and we both left school at 16. If you were doing 'O' levels, now GCSE, you stayed on to 16.

NI 'stamp' didn't only fund retirement. It also funded unemployment and sickness benefits.

margaretclare

LittleMissAspie wrote: »

Only the men. The women didn't work after they had children. My mum left school at 15 but stopped working at 31, and that was late to have children in those days. She still gets a state pension though.

Women didn't work after they had children? A sweeping generalisation and largely untrue.

I have always worked, from age 16 to 67, born in 1935, had 2 children born 1961 and 1963. Stopped work at the end of 1960 but I was back at work when youngest was 6 months old, that was the summer of 1964. Because I mainly worked in nursing and midwifery, the majority of people who worked alongside me were women. A large proportion of them had children - I know, because what do you think they used to talk about during night shifts when it was quiet?

I have read that my generation has been called the 'golden cohort'. Because we lived through wartime rationing - enough food but not too much - and we were active as a matter of course, walking to school etc, we grew up healthy. The way we grew up was in complete contrast to today's bairns. We were then just old enough to benefit from all the post-war improvements, the NHS, better housing etc. Assuming we survived the risks of adulthood, industrial, smoking etc and even the lads being called up into the forces for all the post-colonial wars and the 'cold war', if we got to age 65 we have a good life expectancy after that. Today's children will likely die earlier as a result of e.g. the obesity/diabetes crisis. Where earlier generations died of the diseases of privation, today's children may die of the diseases of excess.